Africa rushes to borrow decade after debt relief

Nearly a decade after Nelson Mandela and anti-poverty activists Bono and Bob Geldof persuaded the rich world to forgive Africa’s crushing debts, many countries’ debt levels are creeping up again, which could undermine the region’s growth boom.

As African states line up to join the growing club of dollar bond issuers, economists and analysts warn of a slide back into indebtedness that could undo recent economic gains and create a “Eurobond curse” to match the distorting “resource curse”.

“Eurobonds have become like stock exchanges, private jets and presidential palaces. Every African leader wants to have one,” said one investor, asking not to be named.

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In 2007, Ghana became the first African beneficiary of debt relief to tap international capital markets, issuing a $750 million 10-year Eurobond. Since then, previously debt-burdened countries, such as Senegal, Nigeria, Zambia and Rwanda, have also put their names on the list of bond issuers.

Governments seeking to replace declining foreign aid and pay for infrastructure are also taking concessional funds from multilateral institutions, more expensive commercial bank loans and bilateral financing from lenders like China and Brazil.

No sub-Saharan countries are in immediate danger of default and most are largely financing themselves domestically, but the debt build-up is stirring up troubling memories of the past.

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“The financial sector loves to find people to prey on and their most recent prey are governments in developing countries,” Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told Reuters in an interview during a conference in Johannesburg this month.

“They get overindebted, they get a bailout from the World Bank and IMF and they start over again. I think it’s unconscionable, but their memory is short and their greed is large, so it’s going to happen again.”

Up to 30 low-income sub-Saharan African countries had their debts reduced under the IMF and World Bank’s Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, which was later supplemented by the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI).

An estimated $100 billion of debt was wiped out, easing countries’ onerous debt burdens, often the result of loans taken on by corrupt regimes. These had meant more being spent on debt service payments than on health and education combined.

Although debt sustainability in Africa has improved since the debt relief initiative, a forthcoming World Bank paper warns of a risk of over-borrowing, especially by countries expecting new revenues from resource discoveries. One of the co-authors of the study shared its findings with Reuters.

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In Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, Senegal, Niger, Malawi, Benin and Sao Tome and Principe, debt levels are creeping back up. If all continue to borrow and grow at current rates their debt indicators could be back to pre-relief levels within a decade.

Others with rapidly rising debt ratios include Ethiopia, Tanzania and Burkina Faso.

Nevertheless, the study finds that on average there has only been a modest rise in debt-to-GDP ratios in nearly a decade.

In the 26 African HIPC beneficiaries studied, nominal public debt fell from a GDP-weighted average of 104 per cent of GDP before relief, to 27 per cent by 2006 when most had received full debt relief. Half a decade later the ratio was at 34 per cent.

The trend has been broadly the same for resource-rich and resource-poor, and high- and low-income economies, said Mark Roland Thomas, a World Bank manager and co-author of the paper, the first review of debt dynamics in Africa since debt relief.

Ghana, which sold a new $750 million Eurobond and bought back a portion of the 2017 issue last year, shows how growing debt levels can threaten countries’ fiscal dynamics.

Ghana’s stability and roaring economic growth, reaching 14.5 per cent in 2011, have made it an investor favourite. But the government’s inability to tame widening fiscal deficits has led to a deterioration in its debt ratios.

Its debt now represents just over half of its GDP, from 32 per cent in 2008. An expanding current account gap has hit the cedi currency, which has weakened more than nine per cent against the dollar this year, after a 24 per cent slide in 2013. Fitch downgraded the cocoa, gold and oil producer to B from B-plus last October.

Indicators

In a sign of waning market confidence, yields on Ghana’s sovereign debt are higher than for any other African country with an actively traded international bond, at around nine per cent for its 2023 Eurobond and over 20 per cent for domestic debt.

Zambia’s story is in some ways a slow-motion version of Ghana’s. Africa’s biggest copper producer, which sold a hugely oversubscribed debut $750 million Eurobond in 2012 and plans to return to the market, was also downgraded by Fitch last year.

Zambia’s debt is around 30 per cent of GDP, still quite low. The government needs to spend on roads and energy but economists worry its current pace of borrowing cannot be sustained.

For Michael Cirami, an emerging markets fund manager at Eaton Vance Corp, Ghana and Zambia challenge the notion that sustained growth is a given for African nations.

While international bonds bring countries into the global financial market and scrutiny from investors can improve policymaking, there may also be a flipside of looser fiscal policy, he said.